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Cañada Engineering Student Travels to NASA

Tue, 19 May, 2015 at 3:48 pm

Cañada College Engineering student David Alvarez was selected to travel to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas this past April to participate in the NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars project (NCAS). David was selected as one of 240 community college students from across the U.S. to be part of NCAS.

The five-week scholars program culminated with a three-day on-site event at Johnson Space Center and offered students the opportunity to interact with NASA engineers and others as they learned about careers in Science and Engineering. While at NASA, students formed teams and established fictional companies interested in Mars exploration. Each team was responsible for developing and testing a prototype rover, forming a company infrastructure, managing a budget, and developing communications and outreach.

The on-site experience at NASA included a tour of facilities and briefings by NASA subject matter experts. NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars is a project funded in part by the Minority University Research and Education Program, or MUREP, which is committed to the recruitment of underrepresented and underserved students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to sustain a diverse workforce.

At Cañada, David works as a tutor in the STEM Center in the courses of Physics, Engineering, Statics and Dynamics. He is a member of the Society of Hispanic and Professional Engineers (SHPE) and plans to transfer to San Jose State as an Aerospace Engineering major this Fall.